Even as Microsoft eyes are set to the future with its new upcoming slew of next-generation gaming consoles, developers are still investing time, money and efforts in the company’s current devices.
Yesterday, December 28, 2018, the developers over at Unity announced support for DirectX 12 for the Xbox One.
The new Unity 2018.3 update brings driver support that includes better use of multi-core systems and a reduction in overhead.
DirectX 12 on Xbox One brings with it Unity’s new Native Graphics Jobs, which also contributes a significant CPU performance improvement. Alongside these performance benefits, DirectX 12 also brings support for new rendering techniques in Unity, starting with Async Compute, which is available with DirectX 12 on Xbox One out of the box. Async Compute provides valuable GPU performance improvements for any titles that make use of compute on Xbox One.
To start seeing the effects of Unity 2018.3 developers will need to change their Player Settings located in the edit menu. Disable the Auto-Graphics API checkbox, add XboxONeD3D12 (Experimental) to the Graphics API list, and then remove XboxOne from the same list.
As developers start to take advantage of the Unity 2018.3, the Unity team has decided to enable DirectX 12 as the default for all new projects throughout its 2019 roadmap.
For developers with projects that utilize DirectX 11, Unity still plans to maintain the platform for the “foreseeable future.”
